This morning, I received two identical daily briefing emails from USA Today. The subject line was "Life Expectancy in USA Reaches Record High."
As USA Today's web-page version of the email shows, the email body contained no link to or mention of a life-expectancy related article. Giving the paper the benefit of the doubt, I clicked on the email's "5 things you need to know Friday"; it also has nothing on the topic. After searching for and finding Larry Copeland's related article and doing just a little research, it's clear that the news, while indeed a record, is not anywhere near as encouraging as the reporter's cheerleading content would indicate (bolds are mine):
Life expectancy in the USA hits a record high
Good news, America: We're living longer!
Life expectancy in the USA rose in 2012 to 78.8 years – a record high.
That was an increase of 0.1 year from 2011 when it was 78.7 years, according to a new report on mortality in the USA from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics.
The news is a little better for women, a little worse for men. Life expectancy for females is 81.2 years; for males, it's 76.4 years. That difference of 4.8 years is the same as in 2011.
Those life expectancy estimates are for people born in 2012 and represent "the average number of years that a group of infants would live if the group was to experience throughout life the age-specific death rates present in the year of birth," the report says.
If a one-tenth of a year increase seems unimpressive, that's because it is:
The table above shows that annual life expectancy increased by an average of 0.29 years from 1970-1980, 0.17 years from 1980-1990, 0.14 years from 1990-2000, and 0.15 years from 2000 to 2008. Data after that, including this year's, is apparently subject to change. The bureau has pointed out that "Life expectancies for 2000–2008 were calculated using a revised methodology and may differ from those previously published."
Life expectancy (again note that it's subject to change) accelerated a bit from 2008-2011, going from 78.0 seen above to the 78.7 cited by Copeland — an annual average of 0.23 years.
In all of this context, it's hard to see how a 0.1-year increase is "Good news, America ...!" — complete with exclamation point. It will take a few more years to find out, but it's reasonable to wonder if life expectancy might instead be approaching a plateau.
I'll leave it to readers to speculate as to why USA Today would send out two emails with a happy-news subject line with links to no related content. Regardless, suffice it to say that the tiny budge in the figure is no cause for major celebration.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
